


Piece by Piece

by SKJC



Category: Ted Lasso (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Post-S1, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-05
Updated: 2020-12-05
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:55:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27899452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SKJC/pseuds/SKJC
Summary: Roy has a lot of Feelings about the past, and the present.
Relationships: Roy Kent/Keeley Jones
Comments: 8
Kudos: 83





	Piece by Piece

**Author's Note:**

> Let's be clear that I spent approximately 30 seconds googling the football references here, so, uh... right.

Roy wasn’t a stranger to recovering from injuries. His career hadn’t been as full of them as some people’s, but he’d had his share of knocks and bruises, and his knee had been a struggle for years before the breaking point. This was his third time around with surgery on the ligaments, incision scars criss-crossing the joint from each time doctors had used their scopes and tools to do whatever it was they did so that it would hold his body weight and bend the way he told it to again. 

They always used the wording, hold his weight without pain, but that hadn’t been a reality since he’d been twenty-three and he doubted it would be true now that he was getting closer to forty than he cared to think about.

He knew the routine - the crutches, the braces and supports, eventually the training bike and therapy appointments, but in the meantime a lot of time spent sat on his couch alone watching whatever was on television. 

This time, though, Keeley had been such a constant fixture that the ‘alone’ part was a distant memory, and it was strangely comfortable. At first, he protested about not needing a nurse, but she had just let him complain, then gone for a fresh ice pack and paracetamol. 

That she could read him like a cheap novel bothered him less than he thought it really ought to. It was hard to mind when she was like the sun rising warm on his face when he woke with her held close against his chest. That warmth felt like hope for a future that seemed so much less uncertain than it had before, even though he still had no idea what it held.

Even so, Keeley did have other things to do besides entertain him, and he couldn’t exactly begrudge her that. She left to get some work done after breakfast, already trying to work out solutions to the club’s funding for the upcoming season, and Roy was bored. 

The internet offered no shortage of his old games to watch, and he felt in the mood to relive a bit of nostalgia, so it wasn’t terribly hard to find the final match of the 2012 Champions League. Reliving the height of his career wasn’t the worst way to spend an afternoon. 

It was nearly over, more than halfway through the extra time, when he heard the front door open. He still wasn’t entirely used to the little leap his heart did in his chest when Keeley came home. Or to the fact that he already thought of her as part of _home._

“I’m back!” 

“Still here!” He called dryly, and he caught the sound of Keeley laughing as she shuffled around in the front of the house.

It was several minutes later before she came into the room, having changed into a pair of pink joggers and one of his shirts, and she settled down on his good side and swung her legs casually over his lap as she cuddled up to him. “What’s this on?” She asked, glancing at the logos and advertising plastered on the video that was playing. “Honestly, you’ve got like every channel in the country.”

“This was one of the best days of my life.” He circled her in his arms and pulled her closer, shifting around a little to adjust the angle of how his foot was propped on the ottoman in front of him. She smelled of his laundry soap and the pineapple conditioner she used in her hair and that was something else he’d already gotten used to. “Beats more repeats of Coupling.” 

Keeley nodded her understanding and took his hand, twining their fingers together, and she nudged him in the ribs when the camera cut to a close-up shot of him as the sides set up for the shootout to end the match, still all drawn up at the end of the extra time. “Oh, now he’d be well fit if he didn’t look about to murder someone,” she teased.

Roy snorted. On the screen, his younger self was red from screaming to his teammates, eyebrow bloody from a collision during a questionable challenge. He’d worn his hair terribly back then, with tight bushy curls popping in once it had grown too long for his clean shaven face, because some of the other lads had convinced him that was a good look. 

“You were way out of his league and he knew it,” he muttered, and Keeley tilted her head up to give him a quick, sweet kiss. 

“Shame he never even bothered to ask…” 

Roy grinned despite himself but said nothing, focusing back on the screen where his youthful likeness was stepping up to take his shot in the penalties. It never stopped being surreal to watch as a spectator something he remembered every sensation of with every fiber of his being. The ball leaving his foot, soaring just past Bayern’s keeper, and smashing into the back of the net seemed like it was just yesterday and a lifetime ago all at the same time, just like it always did when he watched it back. 

“He thought about it, but you were never short of younger, handsome lads,” he said, eventually. “Wasn’t the type to try and steal someone else’s girl, the fucking stupid prick.”

Keeley must have liked that answer because she laughed and kissed him again, longer that time, and he sank into it, eyes drifting shut. They’d spent a lot of time floating around in each other’s peripheral vision, and yet, knowing what he knew now, he was fairly sure he wouldn’t want to change any of it.

“There’s once I remember,” he said after a while, the now-concluded game on the television forgotten, “it was around that year or close to it, might have been a charity event or maybe awards, doesn’t really matter, and you were with some pretty boy idiot or another from one of the other London clubs, probably -”

“You’ve got a loose definition of ‘remember,’ Roy,” she interrupted, laughing. “Who were you with?”

“Who fucking knows? That’s not the point, you were wearing some fancy silver dress that looked like it had stars or something painted down your back.” He knew fuck all about fashion, there was probably a better way to describe the image from years ago that he could see clearly in his mind, but that wasn’t the point either. “Not a single man there took his eyes off you all night.”

Keeley hummed for a moment, gazing up at him, before she leaned in to murmur suggestively against the shell of his ear, “Sounds like you really did spend a lot of time thinking about it...” 

Her tone wasn’t lost on him. He’d already been a little bit hard from the bit of kissing and cuddling like he was a goddamned teenager again; an embarrassingly common occurrence since the start of their relationship. 

“Thinking about a lot of things right now.” Like how picking her up and carrying her to his bed wasn’t an option thanks to the state of his fucking knee, but the idea of her riding him right here with the afternoon sunlight streaming in through the windows wasn’t half bad either. 

Keeley must have had the same idea because she shifted her legs around to straddle his lap instead, smirking mischievously. “Oh, I bet.” 

Her hips circled once, twice against the tented front of his old faded tracksuit bottoms and then her mouth found his again, hot and searching while they rocked against each other. The sweet little noise she made when he kissed up the side of her neck went right to his cock, and as much as he liked her in his clothes, out of them would be even better. 

Roy tugged at the hem of the oversized shirt and she sat back enough to let him pull it up and off over her shoulders. The sight of her bare from the waist up, already flushed a little pink from arousal, made his brain go fuzzy for a minute. She took advantage of that to reach between them and squeeze his cock through what seemed like entirely too much fabric all of a sudden. 

His shirt ended up on the floor a moment later as well, and the pair of them shuffled around enough that she could shove his trackies down far enough to pull him out and stroke him properly. His head dropped back against the cushions and he made a low noise in his throat and rocked up against her, patience waning the longer she went kept up the slow, deliberate motions. 

It only took Keeley a moment to strip out of her joggers and then she was back in his lap, letting him wind a hand between her thighs as she sank down on him, making both of them gasp and sigh with the pleasure of it. 

Roy didn’t have the leverage in that position to do much more than stroke circles over her clit while she moved, but the little breathy moans his fingers drew from her had quickly become one of his favorite sounds. It wasn’t that adventurous but was enough to get her off, saying his name like a prayer while she clung to him, and he didn’t need much more than that to come himself. She was an overwhelming force in more ways than he could count.

Holding her as her heartbeat slowed back to normal against his chest filled him with a sense of contentment that he still wasn’t quite used to. His thoughts turned to everything they’d been through in the spring, the flirting and the fuck-ups, waiting until it had been the right time, and in hindsight, it seemed as though the path they’d been on had somehow been the right one all along. 

That sounded fucking ridiculous even in his head, he thought, and she’d probably like to hear it even so, but it was entirely too many words to speak when his waistband was still scrunched up around his thighs. 

“I love you,” he said instead, and maybe that was too much sentiment for a Tuesday afternoon when they’d only been together a handful of months, and no one had ever accused him of being a romantic.

For a split second, Roy worried maybe he'd fucked it up, but then Keeley gave a happy sigh that made his heart skip a beat in his chest and straightened up enough to press their foreheads together lightly, a smile playing on her lips, and he couldn’t not kiss her; there couldn't possibly be any other way to deal with the tidal wave of emotions coursing through his veins. 

“I love you too,” she said back against his lips, and then pushed her hands against his chest playfully a moment later when she sat back on his thighs and slid off his lap so he could move. “Didn’t think you’d be the first one to say it, though.” 

He scoffed and made an effort to put his bottoms right. “Don’t spread that around, then. Ruin my reputation.” She was clearly fucking with him, but he wouldn't have expected it either, to be fair. 

“Don’t worry, babe.” Keeley winked and pressed a kiss to his jawline. “It can be our secret that Roy Kent has a heart.” 

*

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Come scream with me about this show on [Tumblr](http://skjc-writes.tumblr.com) or the [unofficial Ted Lasso Discord](https://discord.gg/5jDYgUGSbS)!


End file.
